


the moon, of course, is always there

by clytemnestras



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Character Study, M/M, Pre-Series, the resistance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-30
Updated: 2017-12-30
Packaged: 2019-02-23 20:41:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,699
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13198164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clytemnestras/pseuds/clytemnestras
Summary: you want a better story, who wouldn't?





	the moon, of course, is always there

**Author's Note:**

> (please be aware that I haven't seen tlj at time of writing nor have i seen tfa since 2015 so if this is wildly au... so be it)
> 
> for a delightful anon on tumblr who asked for poe fic, I hope you enjoy!
> 
> title and summary by Siken, because of course

The first boy, he calls Poe a libertine. Holding hands in the midst of sweat and drunkenness, and there is something about the resistance bar, swimming with some kind of atmosphere - the kind that makes everything seem simple and bright - that has him indulge the warm feeling in his belly and kiss boy to his left. He has slow eyes. Hands that just looking at could keep Poe busy for hours, so he takes the one he’s holding and kisses it.

 

It's nice to feel skin that's a little rougher than his own. It tells him how much further he has to come.

 

When the textures start to blur into one, when Poe comes up for air - it was only a moment, but one that seemed to squeeze all the air from his lungs - the boy laughs and looks up at Poe from beneath his eyelashes. He calls him a libertine, a word Poe has to turn over in his head for a long time, tumbling in conflict with the alcohol-warmth.

 

 _Libertine_ , and here he is, desperately scrabbling for the freedom of himself and the rest of the cosmos. _Libertine,_ and here he is, wondering if there's any way to quell the warm, quivering feeling in the pit of his stomach without taking the boy’s face in his hands and kissing him until the rest of his body dissipates.

 

They've been wandering in and out of the same small circles for a few months. Caught glances. Shared smiles. Akash, a guy from the base that used to live in the same town as Poe in the days he thinks of now as strictly _before_ had slept with the boy once, and confessed it loudly with the angles of his body. He remembers the way the boy had held his smile like a secret at the corner of his mouth every time they crossed paths that week and how it left a time bomb of sweetness in Poe’s bloodstream.

 

One that a touch of alcohol to his lips has detonated. Poe doesn't remember his name, but he's memorised the smile and somehow that seems more vital.

 

He leans in on a moment of impulse, one of a thousand such moments that create the patchwork of his being, and whispers a confession into the delicate skin of the boy’s neck.

 

“I don't do this. I’ve never done this.”

 

The boy laughs again, all blurry at the edges from the dim light of the bar and whispers back, “You don't have to flatter me.”

 

He’s not, and everything about his sweating palms and numb mouth belies that, but legend never focuses much on the truth.

 

He stumbles to the bathroom in a haze of sweetness and warm blood. A splash of water can't counteract the sensation, and mingles with the sweat running toward the base of his spine when he finds the boy gone, lost to the crush of revelry.

 

Even if he wants to, he can't bring himself to wash the taste of that mouth away on another drink.

 

*

 

When he was a child, Poe saw a meteor shower burn hot paths through the sky. His mother had her hands on his shoulders, and the coldness they sent sinking through his bones had seemed to freeze his feet in place, pressed deeply into the grass. She had leant down, hooking her bony chin over his shoulder and wrapped her arms around his arms so they were almost knotted.

 

“Shooting stars,” she told him. “Burning up the whole sky just so they can make little boy's wishes come true. All you have to do is close your eyes extra tight and keep your wish a secret between you and the sky. Wanna try it?”

 

He didn't need to nod, his eyes had been squeezed shut since the word _wishes._

 

Poe had wrapped his little hands half way around his mother's wrists and told the shooting stars how much he wanted to chase them.

 

His mother could always hear him, even when he left thoughts unspoken. “My _little wing-tail,”_ she said, (it's still the only word he knows from her mother tongue), “I think it is time for you to visit the world of dreams.”

 

He had dreamt that night he could run the sky, a glittering fire in place of his shadow.

 

*

 

Ships make sense to him. The language of them rings as true to the slopes of his hands that music does to his ears. When his first baby conks out on him, it's luckily still at the base. He is buried under the panelling, feeling around her insides for any spots of tenderness when he sees another pair of hands running along the smooth metal. There's oil deep under the fingernails, and there's a gentleness to the way those hands take in the shape of the ship. He thinks he falls for those hands before there's anything attached to them.

 

“You got any idea what's up with her?” Poe lets himself take the voice in slowly, lets his vision wander up from the hands, across a worn out leather pilot's jacket and the wide shoulders that fill them out so perfectly to a soft face that matches it all in a way he cannot put words to but understands. It's another language.

 

He looks down for long enough to find a spot - something off, something whimpering in pain, and relays the message. He gets a nod, then the mechanic eases into his space, peering into the ship’s inner cavity.

 

“Oh,” the mechanic says, all of a sudden, after a long stretch of time in companionable silence, the two working in an almost symbiosis. His jacket has been shed to expose the true broadness of his shoulders, cotton undershirt pulled lovingly over corded muscle. “My name is Calum, by the way. Think that's normally the first thing people say to each other.”

 

“Poe,” he returns, holding out a hand. “And there's nothing wrong with doing things in the wrong order if you still get the right results.”

 

The work for a little longer, until the hopeful trill of the struggling engine becomes a deep and full harmony of working motor and human labour.

 

“How long have you had her?” Calum asks, wiping his brow on a discoloured rag and staining his forehead slate grey.

 

“Three years,” Poe says, wiping his hands and studying the battered leather jacket so much softer and worn than his own. “And until something else calls out to me as prettily as she did, I’ll probably still be flying her until she drags me into a sun.”

 

“Try it,” Calum says, and it takes a minute before Poe realises he has followed Poe’s eyeline to the orange jacket he was so busy scrutinising.

 

It fits - or it mostly fits, enough that he has to draw it around himself until it warms to his body temperature. It smells of leather and ship fuel and something softly masculine, distinct from himself but achingly familiar.

 

Calum arches an eyebrow and Poe schools his face into a look of subtle pleading that always works in his favour. “If I keep it, you have a reason to come back.”

 

Calum tilts his head. “I suppose I do.”

 

*

 

Calum does come back. He comes most weeks for a month and then most days for another three. They learn more about the space the other inhabits, long stretches of wordless communication more intimate than some of the poetry he’s been told by the married girls in the weapons department.

 

The shape of his lips is as fascinating as the whorls of his fingerprints, and he comes to know them both better than his own skin. He learns through touch, through taste, becomes fluent in both dialects of Calum’s flesh.

 

When Calum's knuckles press softly into the knape of Poe's neck, or when his soft lips study the sensitivity of Poe’s clavicle he understands the looks cast his way since he turned seventeen and his features came into communion with each other. He finds them crossing his own face, wanting and perfectly ready to consume.

 

Poe learns that his spine can shiver with the most careful of teasing kiss and Calum holds their hips together, his hands strong and true.

 

It is only once a space station two quadrants over is hit they go their separate ways, Calum leading the fix-up and Poe another fighter in the retaliation.

 

He keeps the jacket longer still.

 

*

 

Poe is pouring over the first detailed agenda he’s been deemed important enough to touch when she walks in.

 

The senator walks in a deity.

 

She leaves exactly what she is. A politician. A princess. A sharp-eyed woman with control and wit falling freely from every sentence. It doesn't demystify the resistance at all - it is just myth put into realistic color. He has no doubt, looking at the line of her spine and the line of her gaze her ability to topple empires and when she shakes his hand he can't stop thinking about the power he is holding.

 

She remembers his name. (She decides for a moment not to use it. For a single sentence she calls him _captain,_ and the way she smiles assures him it is entirely deliberate.)

 

He tells her he might just understand for the first time why would men go to war over a woman.

 

“I sense a great capacity for dangerous decisions in you,” she replies. “This one is your smartest.”

 

He thinks she has no idea the power of that smile.

 

(And he has no idea the power of his own.)

 

*

 

Every time a message is patched through to his quarters, Poe’s whole body shakes awake until he has poured through the message, a constant of cycle of _soon._

 

Finally, when the details of his first solo mission arrive it is the middle of the night and he consumes the words like a man starved. He brushes the hair from his face with shaking hands and then balls them up at his side. This is real. This is his _purpose._

 

His heart feels as though it is lodged in his throat, but it beats out a steady stream of _yes, yes, yes._

  


**Author's Note:**

> come chat with me on tumblr [@bohemicns](https://) if you feel so inclined


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